Archive

It’s hard to hide a passionately held opinion. RT wrote this review of what is in his estimation still the best novel ever written in the United States while he was surfing around GoodReads–and thinks it’s worth sharing (and by all means, set aside some time to tackle the masterpiece again):

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this is the deal with melville: he was a poet, in love with language, archetypal characters, and whaling. sorry, women need not apply. moby dick is like the america of its author’s time: unbelievably tough, unforgiving, and rich in experience. this is life lived flat out in the face of heaven and hell. don’t whine; eat your chowder and get ready to spend the next several years on a boat travelling the world (before the panama and suez canals). don’t expect to make any money off the trip. do expect to encounter quakers “with a vengeance.”

if you love intensity and drama, if you want to get a better idea of what exactly it is that makes men so crazy, if you love the absolute gorgeousness of american 19th century prose, if you are willing to put up with digressions on the hval, buy this edition and read it (if for no other reason than the Rockwell Kent illustrations). there are still plenty of people out there hunting the white whale.

RT

(& women should note that if they essay this wild fruit (and yes, women in MD are purely incidental), they will get the toughness part as well as any man and the poetry better.)

It’s been quite a week, what with RT’s net connection conking out (now restored), the locating of someone to clean mom’s apartment on a monthly basis (keeping fingers crossed that this person will work out), and mom’s moving from using a walker to using a cane (she fell and broke her hip last summer). And to top it all off: Yes, at last it’s done: RT’s version of Gilgamesh, tablet 4.

Wow, kazow!!!Now onto uploading the file for the completed book, Gilgamesh, tablets 1-4 onto the net, where it will available for purchase as a paperback (probably from Lulu) and as an e-book (probably on Amazon)…details will be worked out in the next few days.

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And to celebrate, here is an excerpt from the finished manuscript, day 2 of tablet 4:

You never know. RT had just about given up on finding any new Dragons of Grammar when out of the blue he found a trove of dragon eggs!

Now any dragon egg would give a Faberge egg a run for its money; these eggs are so rare and come in such a wide range of sizes and shapes (but the form is always beautiful), that any human artifact would come in a shabby second at a respectable auction.

But these eggs are fragile indeed. They require much time and patience on the part of mama dragon (who incubates the eggs) while papa dragon goes off in search of the rarest of rare Etruscan salamis, which he painstakingly cuts into slivers for his brood.

And so it is with any visitors to the happy nest; all must wait up to 3 months for the tiny fry to emerge; it may take another 3 months before the dragonlets begin revealing their grammatical secrets to strangers. One must be patient, and so RT has chosen a relatively talkative dragonlet to start off the latest DoG post: the dragonlet of Aspect.

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At first glance, English speakers may think that aspect is relatively straightforward. The basic distinction drawn by aspect is between a completed or an ongoing action. For instance: “I ate all my Etruscan salami, papa,” or “I was eating my Etruscan salami when you asked, papa.” Technically, our dragonlet will inform you, a completed action is said to be in the perfective aspect, an ongoing action, in the imperfect aspect.

There are two further common distinctions: aspect can indicate a repeated or habitual action: “I’ve always eaten the salami you give me, papa.” And aspect can indicate an action taking place in the past from the point of view of a past action–this is the past perfective aspect.

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But things are seldom that easy. Aspect is often confused with tense. Both grammatical categories indicate the passage of time, the difference being that tense places an act in time as related to the subject or speaker; aspect describes the flow of time within the action.

Whoa, that dragonlet is subtle! Let’s look at some examples of aspect in English:

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A. Past Tense

I went (perfective aspect)

I used to go (habitual aspect)

I was going (imperfective aspect)

I had gone (past perfective aspect)

B. Present Tense

I lose (perfective aspect)

I am losing (imperfective aspect)

I have lost (past perfective aspect)

I have been losing (habitual aspect)

C. Future Tense

I will see (perfective aspect)

I will be seeing (habitual aspect)

I will have seen (consequential aspect)

I am going to see (planned aspect)

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Whew! And that’s right, RT added a couple of new aspect distinctions in his future tense examples. Because there’s a dragon’s nest of possibilities for making distinctions of aspect: prospective (an action occurring after an event that has been referred to); inceptive (the beginning stage of an action or event); inchoative (an event that changes something); progressive; pausitive; regressive…wow, thank you, Mr. Einstein dragonlet!

But fortunately our dragonlet is getting hungry. He wants to know when his next feast of Etruscan salami will happen. Gold stars for knowing what aspect that’s in. RT

Proposing a new alphabet for the English-speaking world seems silly, if not outright foolish, these days. Just imagine the cost of changing all those keyboards, and why do we need a new alphabet, even if it is easier to use than the Roman letters? Computers are available to anyone with access to a public library, and of course people type faster than they could ever write by hand.

And then there is the most difficult problem–the way an alphabet forms connections between visual letters, sound, and thought in the developing brain. Our brains really seem capable of accommodating only one alphabet; teaching “learning” alphabets only confuses the student and makes it harder to learn the “adult” form of an alphabet.

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This looks suspiciously like an argument against teaching handwriting at all, except in the most basic form; that is, for use in notes and the composition of draft materials. This is not so much writing for communication as a private form of stenography. No one but the author need decipher the script, leading to an idiosyncratic style, of use to the author only. This is often what is meant by the term “shorthand.”

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Quikscript is a dedicated calligrapher’s answer to all these problems and objections. To recapitulate: Kingsley Read won a competition to design an alphabet for English–the competition stipulated in Bernard Shaw’s will. The result, Shavian, represented an improvement over the Roman alphabet in many respects, but still had its problems. To further refine the script, Read circulated it to correspondents around the globe for their evaluation and feedback. Using their responses, he redesigned Shavian, calling the new alphabet Quikscript.

Here are the reasons why Quikscript is a superior alphabet:

1) QS is specifically designed for the English language. This helps greatly in making QS more phonetic and easier to learn than our current alphabet. For instance, the English language has twenty-seven vowel sounds; the Roman alphabet has just five vowels. Quikscript has 15 vowels.

2) QS comes in Junior and Senior forms. The learning alphabet, Junior Quikscript, is conceived as part of the entire alphabet system, making the transition to adult writing easy; there are no contradictions/different letter forms for the same phonemes. And the Junior script (given in the chart at the left) is very easy to learn.

3) QS is an alphabet, not a shorthand. As with the roman letters, QS’s letterforms are fixed and can be learned by everyone. This is an alphabet that is easier to write and read than the Latin script–thus going far to solve the problem of fluency and legibility.

4) The most common sounds have been given the easiest letterforms to write.

5) Similar sounds are represented by similar letterforms. That is, this is a featural script.

6) QS follows the one sound-one letter principal.

7) Senior QS features a plethora of shortcuts, such as half-letters, that make writing much easier.

If we take a look at the history of writing, we can see a gradual movement from logographic systems that are difficult to learn and write to semi-phonetic alphabets, often reliant on the memorization of a word’s spelling. Quikscript represents a further step in simplification, efficiency, and beauty. RT

Caving in to his perennial urge to read Emily Dickinson, RT has picked one of her more botanical offerings to mark the change from summer to fall. It’s still hot here in Martinsburg, but everyone is beginning to feel the oncoming of cooler weather. Who better to celebrate the moment than Ms. Dickinson? Enjoy!